After a short one quarter delay, we are pleased to deliver the first Orbit e-magazine of 2023.

We used our time off from publication production to gather feedback from our readers to discover what types of articles you find most compelling and useful.

Based on the feedback we received, you will find that future editions will contain the technical content that Bently Nevada's Orbit eMagazine has historically been famous for.

The focus in this first edition will be around an asset type that many of our readers who work as reliability and maintenance engineers know too well...industrial pumps. As one plant engineer we spoke to called them, the "most troublesome of machine types."

Bently Nevada has a long history, as you will see from the inclusion of a "throwback" piece from 1999 in this edition, of analyzing pump behavior and putting those analyses into machine health management strategies that help discover looming asset condition changes before they can negatively impact production.

Thanks for your continued support of Orbit and we hope you enjoy this first edition of 2023.

Fritz Schweigert

Orbit e-magazine editor



Reciprocating Pumps Condition Monitoring
Throwback: How Our Pump Lab is Increasing Our Understanding of Pump Behavior
The Importance of Process Data in a Plantwide Asset Health Ecosystem
Pumps, plantwide, and digital transformation - part 1
Bently Nevada's Design & Installation Services: Removing blind spots and driving Digital Transformation

Reciprocating Pumps Condition Monitoring

Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" as it is more commonly known, is one of the methods used for unconventional extraction of oil and natural gas fields. Fracking is a proven production enhancement technology used for extracting oil, natural gas, geothermal energy, or water from deep underground.

Throwback: How Our Pump Lab is Increasing Our Understanding of Pump Behavior

Fierce competition is creating intense cost reduction pressures for many of our customers. This is especially true for the oil, gas, and power industries where economic conditions are forcing companies to improve business returns from existing facilities or face the prospect of having to shut them down. Efforts to manage turbomachinery - once the primary focus of machinery protection and management efforts - have given way to intensified programs addressing less critical, rolling element bearing (REB) machinery.

The Importance of Process Data in a Plantwide Asset Health Ecosystem

Even a cursory review of most Bently Nevada monitoring platforms - and the System 1 Asset Health Management application itself - reveals the ability to bring in process data. In our hardware platforms, there are typically input channels or module types that can be configured to accept proportional DC voltages or proportional 4-20 mA current signals . In our System 1 software, process data can be imported via a variety of digital protocols, including Modbus, OPC-DA, and beginning with release 21.1, OPC-UA. But since numerous mechanisms exist for getting process data into System 1, a more fundamental question is, "Why is this data type important?"

Pumps, plantwide, and digital transformation - part 1

I engage with hundreds of customers every year and regardless of the industry, when the discussion turns to plantwide monitoring - let alone enterprise-wide monitoring - pumps always manage to steal the spotlight.

The reason is simple: every industry has them - LOTS of them - and virtually every industry spends too much money maintaining them. The attitude towards pumps has historically been that because many or perhaps most are spared, a pump failure wasn't really too consequential in terms of process impact and thus didn't justify permanent monitoring - just a walk-around program instead. Of course, that doesn't account for pumps handling toxic and/or flammable materials and the ensuing havoc when one fails, catches fire, and brings not just its own process loop but the entire plant to a screeching halt. Those applications generally do merit more than monthly rounds with a portable data collector and thus get bona-fide machinery protection. In fact, that's one of the primary use cases for the 2300 series monitors in our portfolio. But those aren't the class of pumps I'm focused on in this article.

Bently Nevada's Design & Installation Services: Removing blind spots and driving Digital Transformation

Reliability Managers are challenged to ensure safe and cost-efficient operations & maintenance (O&M) on their plantwide industrial assets. This is the niche where a well-positioned specialist as Bently Nevada (BN) offers can supply a broad list of packaged solutions that will place customers closer to their Digital Transformation (DT) via a multiyear roadmap of investment options.



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